Monday, August 22, 2011

They Just Can't Help It

"Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Kadafi," the senators said in a statement released late Sunday night. "But we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

Got it. Our president managed for the first time, ever, to get a desired result by initiating action and then letting others bear most of the military and financial burden. No boots on the ground (that we know of), no US deaths (that we know of). And that's regrettable? It took too long? By what standard? Iraq? Afghanistan?

Not arguing the right or wrong of having intervened at all, it's nevertheless much preferable, in my view, to have let the revolution play out in its own time, with its own people, without the sight -- for once -- of American troops cruising through towns like occupier/liberators. Ownership, is what it's called. Of which there seems to be none in the aforementioned Georgian wars.

But those two frustrated war-lovers think we should regret how it happened. Our military exhausted, our country in debt, soldiers dying by their own hand rather than return for a tenth mission: that pair of jock straps for our troops think we should have done more. Dropped more bombs, claimed more scalps. Thumped more chests. Because of some rusty clock in their Obama-deranged heads; and their belief that having friends in the world counts for nothing.

Pathetic. Country first, they once said. There's simply no way forward when this is how it is.

For The Sake of My Sanity

Some will know me from my other blog, "Surgeonsblog." Of late I've given over to frothing at the mouth as the world descends into stupidity, and our politics and our citizens seem, in numbers enough to be meaningful, unable to see it. So for now I'm leaving surgery writing behind, if for no other reason than to defuse and diffuse my unrelenting sense of doom, and with no expectation of making a difference. These are things that, to me, are obvious. Except that, apparently, they aren't.

RWS™

RWS™: For those who drop by here in the middle, and wonder what it means: it's my shorthand for Right Wing Screamers, which includes such a long list it's tiresome to type it. (I distinguish these blowhards from thoughtful conservatives, of whom I sort of take it on faith that there must still be some.) You know who I mean: Palin, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Breitbart (RIP), Malkin, Savage, Levin, Ingraham, Doocey (more of a drooler than a screamer), Hewitt, Goldberg, Gingrich, Kristol, Scarborough (+/-), Bachmann, Inhofe, Bond, Broun, Boehner, Kelley, Santorum, Cain. To name but a few. Behold them in their unrepentant disregard for reality: the RWS™